The police car passed my sister’s partner on the road outside the house. He watched her go by, head down, in the back seat. Then the officers told him there were two bodies inside. He called me.
It was around half eleven at night. He said, “I think it’s your mom and Katie. ”
I said, “No. No, that’s not right.
This is a joke. ”
But it wasn’t a joke. My mother, Elizabeth Edwards, was 49 years old. My little sister, Katie, was only 13.
They were found dead in their beds at the family home in Spalding, Lincolnshire. The police had forced their way in through a window after my sister Kim and her boyfriend Lucas didn’t show up to school. When they got inside, they found the two of them lying on a mattress together. They’d been in the house for 36 hours after the murders.
They hadn’t run. They hadn’t cried. They’d had a bath together, watched films, made love. The bodies of our mom and Katie were upstairs the whole time.
When the police asked Kim where her mother was, she said, “Why don’t you look upstairs? ”
When they asked what happened, Lucas said, “Why don’t you have a look? ”
They were both 14 years old. I’m Mary, Kim’s older sister.
I was two hours away in Derby with my own young family when the call came. I drove down to identify the bodies, convinced the whole way that I’d walk in and it wouldn’t be them. But as soon as they opened the door, I knew. I broke down right there.
That was the moment I understood I no longer had a mother or a sister. What I learned afterward made it even harder to process. Our mom was stabbed at least eight times. There were defensive wounds on her hands, so she fought.
But the wounds to her neck were fatal. She bled out slowly, alone, in her bedroom. Then Lucas went into the room where Kim and Katie slept. Katie’s neck wound wasn’t fatal.
So they put a pillow over her face and smothered her until she stopped breathing. The only reason they gave for killing Katie was that she had called the police once. I remember sitting in court during the trial, staring at Kim, wanting to jump over the bench. She looked over at me at one point and smirked.
Like it was all a game. Like she was enjoying the attention. Let me go back to the beginning, because the real story started long before that night. Kim was never an easy person to reach.
When we were younger, our mom tried everything. She’d give her cuddles, tell her she could talk about anything, say “I’m not going to have a go at you, I just want to know what’s going on in your head. ” Kim would always turn around and say, “Mom doesn’t care about me. ”
She was convinced Katie was the favorite.
That was absolute nonsense. My mom loved all of us the same. But Kim believed what she believed. There were times our mom would call me in absolute tears, saying, “I don’t know what to do anymore.
I literally don’t know what to do. ”
I tried to talk to Kim myself once. I said, “If you ever have any problems, you can ring me. ” She never did.
She was withdrawn, in her own bubble. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Then, in the spring of 2015, she met Lucas Markham. He was in the same behavioral unit at school, a place for kids who needed to be separated from the rest.
On the outside, they seemed like a normal young couple, loving and caring, wanting to spend all their time together. But their relationship was intense from the very first moment. They each saw in the other a person who understood the anger and the hurt they carried inside. Lucas had his own wounds.
His mother died of cancer when he was young. He and his brother had bounced around foster care for years before moving in with an aunt. He’d learned to survive on his own, to see the world as a hostile place where nobody could be trusted. Kim felt unloved.
Lucas felt abandoned. Together, they fed each other’s anger until it became something monstrous. My mom tried to split them up. She was worried about Lucas’s influence on Kim.
I tried too. I told Kim, “Since you’ve been with him, you’ve been really down. You don’t smile anymore. You don’t act like a sister to Katie anymore.
You’re losing all your friends. ”
She just said, “I don’t care. I love him. I want to be with him.
No one else matters. ”
The more we tried to pull them apart, the tighter they held on. They saw our mom as an obstacle. Lucas showed his anger whenever her name came up.
Once, Kim told him she couldn’t see him that night, and he threw his phone across the classroom so hard it broke. On the 13th of April 2016, they decided to remove the obstacle. Lucas had brought a bag of knives. Kim let him in through the bathroom window.
The plan was for both of them to kill mom and Katie while they slept. But when it came time, Kim froze. She took a knife from the bag, but she never used it. She left it in the bathroom with the others.
Lucas went into my mom’s room alone. He stabbed her in the neck while she slept on her side, then pressed a pillow over her face. Kim heard the noises and went to check. She saw Lucas on top of our mom with a pillow over her head.
She said she thought she heard my mom say, “Get off me. ”
She didn’t stop him. She stood there and waited. After about ten minutes, he was sure my mom was dead.
Then they went into the room where Katie was, and Lucas stabbed her too. When she didn’t die fast enough, he smothered her with a pillow as well. Afterward, they washed the blood off in the bath together. Kim climbed into the tub with Lucas and helped clean his face.
They put their bloody clothes in my mom’s room. Then they had sex and watched Twilight films. They were playing out some romantic fantasy in their heads while the bodies of our mom and 13-year-old sister were lying dead in the next rooms. In police interviews, Kim was calm.
She showed no emotion. She said she was happy about what happened, to a point. She said, “My mom doesn’t have to deal with me being suicidal anymore. She doesn’t have to wake up worrying every morning to see if I’m still alive.
And my sister doesn’t have to go through the heartbreak. ”
It all sounded like she was trying to convince herself she did it out of love. But she didn’t do it for anyone else. She did it because she thought the world revolved around her.
Lucas told investigators the plan had come together just days before. He said he told Kim, “I wish I could kill her. ” Kim thought he was joking at first. But he wasn’t.
When she realized he was serious, she became serious too. There had been earlier attempts. On the first night, Lucas knocked on her window but she’d fallen asleep. The second night, the same thing.
On the third night, he walked along a canal in the dark, made it to her window, and this time she was there. She waved. He gave a thumbs up. That was the night everything changed.
They were charged with murder on the 17th of April. I was told on the Sunday night. I thought, “Okay, that’s my sister. Why would she do that?
” I knew she was unhinged, but I didn’t think she was that unhinged. In court, both pleaded not guilty to murder and instead admitted to manslaughter. Lucas later changed his plea to guilty of murder. Kim stuck with her version and was put on trial.
At her trial, she showed no remorse. Not even for Katie. The one thing I kept asking myself, and still ask today, is why Katie? My mom, I can understand.
Kim hated my mom. Everyone could see that. But Katie did nothing to her. Katie was just a little girl.
And Kim killed her anyway. The couple was found guilty. In November 2016, they were both sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 20 years. On appeal, that was reduced to 17 and a half years.
I still think about it every day. People talk about blood being thicker than water. I say, “Yeah, have you met my family? ”
In my head, there will always be unanswered questions.
You don’t expect your sister to do something like that to her own mother and little sister. I don’t think I’ll ever find peace.
